Precision medicine holds great promise for the treatment of cancer and represents a unique opportunity for accelerated development and application of novel and repurposed therapeutic approaches. Current studies and clinical trials demonstrate the benefits of genomic profiling for patients whose cancer is driven by specific, targetable alterations. However, precision oncologists continue to be challenged by the widespread heterogeneity of cancer genomes and drug responses in designing personalized treatments. Chapters provide a comprehensive overview of the computational approaches, methods, and tools that enable precision oncology, as well as related biological concepts. Covered topics include genome sequencing, the architecture of a precision oncology workflow, and introduces cutting-edge research topics in the field of precision oncology. This book is intended for computational biologists, bioinformaticians, biostatisticians and computational pathologists working in precision oncology and related fields, including cancer genomics, systems biology, and immuno-oncology.

A hallmark of high-quality cancer care is the delivery of the right treatment to the right patient at the right time. Precision oncology therapies, which target specific genetic changes in a patient's cancer, are changing the nature of cancer treatment by allowing clinicians to select therapies that are most likely to benefit individual patients. In current clinical practice, oncologists are increasingly formulating cancer treatment plans using results from complex laboratory and imaging tests that characterize the molecular underpinnings of an individual patient's cancer. These molecular fingerprints can be quite complex and heterogeneous, even within a single patient. To enable these molecular tumor characterizations to effectively and safely inform cancer care, the cancer community is working to develop and validate multiparameter omics tests and imaging tests as well as software and computational methods for interpretation of the resulting datasets. To examine opportunities to improve cancer diagnosis and care in the new precision oncology era, the National Cancer Policy Forum developed a two-workshop series. The first workshop focused on patient access to expertise and technologies in oncologic imaging and pathology and was held in February 2018. The second workshop, conducted in collaboration with the Board on Mathematical Sciences and Analytics, was held in October 2018 to examine the use of multidimensional data derived from patients with cancer, and the computational methods that analyze these data to inform cancer treatment decisions. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the second workshop.

Cancer is the second most common cause of death worldwide and encompasses highly variable clinical and biological scenarios. Some of the current clinical challenges are (i) early diagnosis of the disease and (ii) precision medicine, which allows for treatments targeted to specific clinical cases. The ultimate goal is to optimize the clinical workflow by combining accurate diagnosis with the most suitable therapies. Toward this, large-scale machine learning research can define associations among clinical, imaging, and multi-omics studies, making it possible to provide reliable diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers for precision oncology. Such reliable computer-assisted methods (i.e., artificial intelligence) together with clinicians' unique knowledge can be used to properly handle typical issues in evaluation/quantification procedures (i.e., operator dependence and time-consuming tasks). These technical advances can significantly improve result repeatability in disease diagnosis and guide toward appropriate cancer care. Indeed, the need to apply machine learning and computational intelligence techniques has steadily increased to effectively perform image processing operations-such as segmentation, co-registration, classification, and dimensionality reduction-and multi-omics data integration.

This book concisely describes the role of omics in precision medicine for cancer therapies. It outlines our current understanding of cancer genomics, shares insights into the process of oncogenesis, and discusses emerging technologies and clinical applications of cancer genomics in prognosis and precision-medicine treatment strategies. It then elaborates on recent advances concerning transcriptomics and translational genomics in cancer diagnosis, clinical applications, and personalized medicine in oncology. Importantly, it also explains the importance of high-performance analytics, predictive modeling, and system biology in cancer research. Lastly, the book discusses current and potential future applications of pharmacogenomics in clinical cancer therapy and cancer drug development.

This book will be among the first to cover the detection methods for precision medicine that are set to transform health care in the future.